Posted: Wed Aug 15, 2007 8:57 pm Post subject: Jo Brand
People see me playing with my kids and think I am their granny! 15/08/2007
Strolling in the park with her young baby, Jo Brand was stopped by a passer-by. The woman cooed over the little girl in the pram, turned to Jo and gushed: "What a beautiful grandchild you have." It could have been a devastating blow for any mum, but in true comic fashion, Jo took it it on the chin.
"I used to get a lot of people saying 'Oh, you are such a lucky granny'," she says. "But the fact of the matter is you can be a grandma at 35 these days. A friend of mine said he was in Hull and was driving through an estate and there was a big banner over someone's door that actually said: 'Happy 30th birthday Nan'!" She lets out her trademark throaty laugh. At 50, Jo seems much younger than her years. But she was a very mature 43 when she had her first child, Maisie, now six. Was it hard becoming a mum later in life?
"The lack of sleep comes as a massive shock," Jo nods. "You get so irritable. Even nice things don't make you happy when you're tired. A guy would turn up at the door with a nice bouquet of flowers for a job I'd done and I'd just think 'Great, now I've got to find a fucking vase'. But I don't think people are as ageist as they used to be. If I was 85 and at the school gate, having just eased myself out of my bath chair, then perhaps it would have been different. But there are a lot of 30-year-old mums who behave like 50 year olds, and then there are a lot of older mums who are full of energy."
Jo now has a second daughter Eliza, who is four. "It wasn't a conscious effort to have kids later," she explains. "It was just the way life goes. Most of us manage the fateful things that happen in our lives the best we can, certainly not to a Stalin-like 20-year plan. I hoped I'd become a mum but I didn't expect to. I don't think anyone should. I think that's the big problem these days. There's this expectation that medical science will let us do absolutely anything."
As it is, Jo is pleased to have had kids in her 40s, though. "One of the big problems with women who have kids quite young is that they haven't gone as mad as they should," she says. "They haven't been to enough clubs and out with enough people and they immediately feel restrained that they have to be in all the time. When I got pregnant lots of people said, 'You're now going to have to stay in every night' and I said 'Yay, I can't wait'. As a stand-up you work mainly in the evenings, so I thought 'Good, I'll get to see a whole week of EastEnders'." So would she have more kids? "At 50?" Jo lets out a barrel laugh for five minutes. So that's a 'no' then.
I HAVE TO TELL PEOPLE I'M NOT GAY
Jo was 38 when she met her husband Bernie Bourke at a comedy show. They married in secret the next year. It came as a surprise to many - not least because after years of telling anti-men jokes some assumed she was a lesbian. "I think what some papers do is create three adjectives for famous people - with me it was 'man-hating fat lesbian', so anything that didn't fit into that was ignored and anything that did was reiterated many times," she smiles. I often tell audiences at the start of my shows that I'm not gay because I've got petitions from lesbian groups saying 'Can you tell people you're heterosexual because you're giving us a bad name'."
At 44, Bernie is six years younger than Jo - "Don't put 'toyboy' in," she chuckles. "I will personally come round and kill you." Bernie is far from the public spotlight - he works as a psychiatric nurse at a hospital in London. "Which is handy for me if I go mad," Jo laughs. Despite their different worlds though, they have at least one obvious thing in common. Jo was a psychiatric nurse herself for 10 years before she became a comic. And it was her experiences working with people with mental illnesses that prompted her to sign up for the Hydro Active Women's Challenge 5km run on September 16, to raise money for the Alzheimer's Society.
"People think fat people can't run," Jo says. "They can - not very fast and it doesn't look attractive, but who cares? I'm sick of this whole thing of having to look like somebody else. I'm not preaching that fat is healthy, it's not. But if you are fat, you don't just have to sit in a chair and eat chocolate." Jo is training by running and swimming once a week. "It's really hard if you're overweight to go to the gym and go on the treadmill with these two-and-a-half stone miracle people," she says. "I think gyms are places for people to show off how well they've done rather than for people who need them. I like running at night when it's dark. There are fewer people out and they are less likely to see you."
I GOT ASKED FOR MY AUTOGRAPH WHILE I WAS IN LABOUR!
Jo's parents are both alive and well - her mum is 73 and her dad is 77 - but they have each given Jo instructions on what should happen to them if they ever did suffer from Alzheimer's. "My dad says he would like to go into a home, while my mum would like me to put a pillow over her face," she says. "Not immediately, obviously, but she doesn't want to be cared for."
And what does Jo - who keeps her brain in ticking order by doing a cryptic crossword which makes her "brain explode" every Saturday - hope will happen to her? "As long as someone stuck me in front of Big Brother with a pint of lager I wouldn't care," she laughs. It is a typical Jo response - a serious question met with a joke. But then humour is where she feels most comfortable.
Jo started out as a stand-up with the stage name The Sea Monster in the 80s. In 1993 she landed her own Channel 4 series Through The Cakehole. In 2003 we saw a softer side when she allowed Trinny and Susannah to give her a makeover on What Not to Wear. "It helped me in a way because people hopefully saw I wasn't regularly sawing men's bollocks off or calling for them to be executed and I was fairly normal," she smiles.
This was followed by enthusiastic stints on Fame Academy and The Apprentice, both for Comic Relief. I think you should be prepared to humiliate yourself to the nth degree for charity," she shrugs. But she has ruled out ever doing I'm A Celebrity... or Celebrity Big Brother. "I snore, so anything where you have to stay the night while they're filming you is off really," she explains.
Jo's popularity - and unmistakable appearance - earns her a lot of attention when she's out. So much so she now actively avoids places where people will be drunk. "I've had people sitting on my lap trying to stick their tongue in my mouth, or asking for my phone number," she says matter of factly. "But if I go to places where people are sober they don't tend to behave like that."
And the most unlikely place she has been asked for an autograph? "When I was in labour giving birth to my first child with my legs akimbo a head came round the door and said, 'I know this is probably an inconvenient time' which was the understatement of the year," she laughs before adding deadpan: "I said 'You know what? I'll do it later, when I've got a bit more time!'"
Jo is running the 5km Hydro Active Women's Challenge on Sunday, September 16.
I absolutely idolise Jo Brand. Who else can do stand-up shows as vulgar as hers yet still be welcomed back time and time again as a guest on Countdown? Hehehehe!!!!
I was lucky enough to see her first shows in London (Comedy Store) when she was 'The Sea Monster', a good few from those days made it to T.V. quite quickly (Julian Cleary, Phil Cornwall etc (bad spellings of names I fear)).
Some of her best stuff IMHO are on the chat shows & panel shows such as QI.
It allows her natural humor to shine, she's a tad too clever for some people in those situations, often very dry yet non-offencive, perhaps people I have talked with about her remember & prefer her 'offencive' stuff or just don't get the gist of intelectual comedy.
Jo Brand: Me? Singing? I couldn't get arrested? She was the first to exit 'Celebrity Fame Academy', but now comedian Jo Brand is starring in 'The Pirates of Penzance'. She tells Jasper Rees why 30/01/2008
telegraph.co.uk
Jo Brand, the least animated, least antic of stand-ups, is the first to admit she is not a gifted actress. Her singing is known not to be much better. Exposed to the public vote, she was first to be booted off Celebrity Fame Academy. These manifest drawbacks have not, however, prevented Brand from landing the part of the police sergeant in a West End revival of The Pirates of Penzance.
This could be the way the arts are going. Last year a non-singing Dawn French infiltrated the Royal Opera House in La Fille du régiment. Alistair McGowan, who has done two other musicals in the past year, has a role in The Mikado, which, with Iolanthe, is part of the same Raymond Gubbay G&S season. But Brand, to sing A Policeman's Lot is not a Happy One?
"It's not going to be a virtuoso performance," she warns. "I said to them right at the beginning that I can't act and I can't sing, but they didn't seem to mind." They mind so little that she has had only two one-hour sessions on her singing. "A very upmarket singer called Maria Ewing is doing Iolanthe," she says. (It's uncertain whether Brand is the one who hasn't heard of her, or she thinks I haven't.) "Apparently, she said to the producer, 'This is the most low-brow thing I've ever done,' whereas I said to him, 'It's probably the most high-brow thing I've ever done.' What I love is being in the rehearsal room so close to that sound, which is absolutely fantastic."
But the thing that initially swung it for her was her father's love of Gilbert and Sullivan. The famous operettas formed a soundtrack to her childhood in Kent. "It was an opportunity to do something that he liked for a change. He likes Ken Dodd. Let's face it, me and Ken Dodd couldn't be more different."
Indeed. When Brand first emerged in the early 1990s, she carved out a niche as a bolshy, ball-breaking stand-up with a repertoire of jokes about cakes and tampons, and a Swiftian eye for women's habits and problems. "I've always been criticised for how filthy my material is. Victoria Wood said to me once, 'I wish I was a bit ruder, like you,' and I said, 'Well, I wish I was a bit cleaner, like you.'?"
It has taken a variety of reckless challenges to instil in Brand's public persona an aura of vulnerability and even softness. When she gamely suffered the Trinny and Susannah treatment a couple of years ago, a soul tortured by her self-image was opened up for inspection.
Her cultural side - we meet at her suggestion in the Dulwich Picture Gallery near her home - was revealed in Play It Again, the BBC series in which celebs took on a musical challenge. As was her courage: Brand's task was to learn Bach's Toccata in D minor and play it on the organ to a packed Albert Hall. "I never ever take into consideration the consequences of my actions until it's too late. A huge blanket of fear settled on me. I know I've got up in front of people before, and also the Albert Hall audience don't tend to be drunk and lairy, thankfully. The main difficulty was that I had no microphone to say, 'Look I'm sorry, everyone, this isn't going to be very good,' and make them like me."
It's always been a misconception that Brand is armour-plated. With her unflappable drawl and nihilistic dress sense, she just sounds and looks that way. She came to comedy via 10 years in psychiatric nursing. Apart from the odd routine about public perception of mental illness - and the insights into obsessive behaviour she is channelling into a novel about Morrissey fans - her previous life did prepare her for a life in stand-up in one useful way.
"As a comic and as a nurse it's important to look calm on the surface when you're absolutely crapping yourself inside. So, if someone is waving a machete at you, which has happened to me when I was a nurse, it's important to make that person feel that you're in control. And that's the same with audiences. If you let an audience see even the slightest chink of pure white terror then their instinct is to finish you off. It's something about audiences - it's not very pleasant."
Thus the one time the level of drunken abuse got so gynaecological that she was reduced to throwing her beer at the culprit (and missing) and then to tears, she made sure she did her blubbing offstage. Mostly she can look after herself just fine. At one of the many corporate engagements she does purely for the money, an advertising executive accepting an award from her whispered an arrogant insult in her ear, only to hear his barb revealed to a stunned roomful of ad execs.
"I actually thought that was a really bullying thing to do. If he wanted to abuse me, do it in front of everyone else and I'll handle it." But when all is said and done, Brand takes the sunny view that the comedian's lot is not an unhappy one. 'I used to think to myself, OK, it's really unpleasant dying on your arse and it's horrible someone shouting, 'F*** off, you fat cow', but there are much worse things.
"I fell into it because I like making people laugh and because I thought it was easy in terms of the hours. It's a very easy job compared to most people's. As a fat woman, I felt I'd had enough things shouted at me in the street by lorry drivers to be able to cope with the humiliation that happens on stage."
Where flinging words and beer don't do the trick, there is a final resort for flattening hecklers. "I know how to get someone on the floor on my own in about half a second and sit on them. And occasionally I will visit that upon my friends when they're least expecting it, just to see if I can still do it." Whether it will be necessary for her all-singing, all-acting Victorian policewoman to resort to these tactics remains to be seen.
I've actually only seen her a few times. I had no clue who she was when I moved over to the UK. From what I have seen though I really enjoy her act. I would like to see more.
Here she is in a clip from BBC Scotland's 'Live Floor Show'. This was filmed in 2003, and if you listen near the end when someone shouts out 'cheat!', that's me in my most publicised heckle to date... haha
the quality of the clip is pretty poor, but it was 5 years ago and webspace was at a premium back then.
Jo Brand turns into scarlet hooter to help launch Red Nose Day 29 JANUARY 2009
Silly behaviour, famous faces wearing red noses, and Jo Brand dressed as a giant red honker can only mean one thing, the return of Comic Relief. On Thursday London's Leicester Square was packed with celebrities, each one doing their bit to ensure the success of this year's Red Nose Day on March 13. Among them were Gavin And Stacey trio Ruth Jones, Rob Brydon and Joanna Page. And this year there are even more reasons to don the charity drive symbol as it comes in three choices, each with its own distinct cheeky expression.
In addition to promoting the launch, Ruth and Rob have also lent their vocal talents to this year's Comic Relief single, a cover of country hit Island In The Sun. Other Red Nose Day events include UK landmarks being turned red, and Carol Vorderman facing Alan Sugar on Celebrity Apprentice.
Now we know who to send the *** to; police probe Jo Brand's anti-BNP race joke by Some Daily Mail Prick
31st January 2009
Comedienne Jo Brand is at the centre of a police investigation over quips she made on the comedy programme that temporarily replaced Jonathan Ross’s TV chat show. A senior producer on the Friday night Live At The Apollo show has been questioned by the Metropolitan Police about the incident.
The remarks by Jo Brand concerned the leaking of the British National Party’s membership list. Brand, joked that as a result of the list becoming public knowledge on the internet, she now knew the addresses where to send the ‘poo’ through the post.
Brand’s routine was a hit with the live audience, who laughed and cheered at her remarks. However, the joke, which was broadcast on the late-night BBC1 show from Hammersmith Apollo on January 16, offended members of the BNP. The following day, Simon Darby, the BNP’s deputy leader, made an official complaint to Hammersmith police alleging that Brand’s comment had been an act of incitement to cause racial harassment.
A police spokesman last night confirmed: ‘We have received a complaint and officers will be reviewing the programme to see if any offences have occurred.’ But a senior police source said: ‘It is an absurd case and very unlikely to get to court. A lot of police time and money appears to have been wasted investigating what for all intents and purposes is just a TV show joke.’
The offending remarks by Brand have been posted online on YouTube. She is seen telling the audience: ‘Let’s start with some important political news. Did you hear this, right, that BNP members and supporters have had their names and addresses published on the internet, hurrah! Now we know who to send the poo to!’
Further complaints from the BNP followed, to the BBC and the police, and a formal review was launched two weeks ago – at an estimated cost of thousands of pounds to the taxpayer. Officers spoke with the show’s producer about the programme’s content but did not arrest or formally caution him. Miss Brand is believed to have told officers, through her producer: ‘It was just a joke!’
A file was sent to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) last week to determine if there is enough evidence for a successful prosecution to be made against Miss Brand or the BBC. A decision will be made by the CPS in the next few days. But a police source said: ‘The chances of this going further are very remote. The idea that the BNP are claiming they are the victim of a race offence is mildly amusing, to say the least.’
Jo Brand’s agent, Vivienne Clore, said: ‘I have spoken to Jo and she thought all this had gone away. She is co-operating with any investigation.’
Last night the BNP’s Simon Darby said: ‘The BNP is technically an ethnic group and, under Section 26 of the Race Relations Act, we would suggest there are grounds that an offence of incitement to commit racial harassment has been committed.’ A BBC spokesman said last night: ‘We do not comment on police matters. However, we believe the audience would have understood the satirical nature of the remarks.’
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So the BNP are claiming to be an ethnic group now?
I edited this story to remove some of the idiotic bias by the hack who shat it out - if I'd removed it all I'd have ended up with just the photo and the residual sound of cops laughing.
Jo Brand: A softer brand of humour When Carol Thatcher made her now infamous comment, the ears of one of our most irreverent comedians were assailed By Andy McSmith
Saturday, 7 February 2009
independent.co.uk
We are used to men and women who think they are funny landing themselves in the news by being offensive. Russell Brand, Jonathan Ross, Jeremy Clarkson, Chris Moyles... the list is long. But a comedian taking offence at someone else's attempt at banter is an unusual variation on the theme.
Jo Brand is the person who, without necessarily intending it, caused Carol Thatcher to lose her job with the BBC programme The One Show, in a furore that says a great deal about contrasting views of what constitutes offensive language. As participants in that show were relaxing in a hospitality suite known as the green room, Thatcher described a tennis player named Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, who has a white French mother and a black Congolese father, as a "golliwog frog". When Jo Brand took issue with this comment, Thatcher was apparently quite unable to see where the problem lay. "Well, he's half-golliwog," she is reported to have said. At this, a disgusted Jo Brand walked out of the room.
So what is shocking here? According to your point of view, it is either the crass insensitivity and implicit racism displayed by the daughter of the former prime minister, or it is that her remarks, made in a private, were leaked to the press, or it is the BBC's reaction in disciplining Thatcher after she had refused to apologise adequately. One writer in the Daily Mail, for example, was not at all offended by what Thatcher said, and thinks that Jo Brand was behaving like "some cloistered Victorian maiden aunt" in reacting as she did. What really offends this particular contributor is Brand's bawdy stage act, which makes her, in his estimation, "one of the most foul-mouthed, irreverent performers on the comedy circuit".
Actually, there was nothing "Victorian" in the way Jo Brand reacted to that word "golliwog". The generation that grew up in middle-class homes in the 1950s and 1960s, as Carol Thatcher did, was nurtured by great-aunts and grandmothers born in Victoria's reign, who happily sat down with children to read the stories of Enid Blyton, where golliwogs are nasty, threatening intruders in Toytown. But these Victorian ladies would certainly have had reach for the smelling salts if they had ever been subjected to Jo Brand's stage act, which is clean of any hint of racism, but drips with filth upon such subjects as sex and bodily excretions.
The comedian is herself currently being accused of something which, in theory anyway, is more serious than Carol Thatcher's offence. Earlier this month, the police received a formal complaint about remarks she made during a live show in Hammersmith, which was broadcast by the BBC in the slot temporarily vacated by Jonathan Ross. Clearly enjoying the embarrassment that the far-right British National party suffered when the names of 13,000 of its alleged members were posted on the net, Brand told her audience: "Let's start with some important political news. Did you hear this, right, that BNP members and supporters have had their names and addresses published on the internet? Hurrah! Now we know who to send the poo to!"
Without a trace of irony, the deputy leader of the BNP, Simon Darby, complained to Hammersmith police that this was an incitement to racial harassment. A police spokesman has confirmed that the complaint was lodged but indicated that it is highly improbable that the case will ever go to court.
And five years ago, the BBC felt the need to apologise for an unscripted joke from Jo Brand during a Christmas broadcast, in which she offered to "fart the Albanian national anthem". Albanian viewers were offended, apparently.
Josephine Grace Brand was born on 3 May 1957 in Hastings, East Sussex. She grew up in a Kent village, where her mother was a social worker, and emerged from Tunbridge Wells Grammar School for Girls with eight O-levels. She seems to have had a carefree childhood, mucking around competitively with her two brothers, doing whatever they did, including smoking, drinking and staying out all hours. At 15, she fell in love with a wastrel four years older than she was, a heroin addict from a posh family. At 16, she received an ultimatum from her parents: pull yourself together or get out. She got out.
Living in rented accommodation with her upper-class lover, she found a job organising cleaners for the Department of Environment, and went back to school one day a week. But he found himself a job in London, leaving her alone in the bedsit during the week. When she went to meet him one Friday evening, she found him locked in the embrace of another girl. The relationship broke up, and at about the same time, she turned into a fat lady, having somehow gained more than two stone, which she never really summoned the motivation to lose.
Drifting from one job to another, she arrived at Dr Barnado's home for adults, which stimulated an interest in nursing. She took a degree in social science and nursing at Brunel University and, on graduating in 1982, trained as a psychiatric nurse at the South London Bethlem and Maudsley Hospital. Dealing with mentally ill people induced in her a tolerance of strange behaviour. Reading the cases notes that described the childhoods of some of them, she marvelled that they were not even more disturbed.
Her evenings were spent in the large number of clubs and pubs where stand-up comics performed alternative comedy for anyone sober enough to listen. She calculated that there were 50 men for every woman on the circuit. As her 30th birthday drew near, she made one of those desperate decisions that people make when they feel their youth slipping away, and decided to have a go on stage.
At her first gig, she was scheduled to make a short appearance at about midnight, after the audience had been softened up by three experienced male performers. It was an audience from hell. All three of the acts that preceded hers bombed. As she watched, aghast, she sank seven pints of lager. Thus she faced her first audience with bursting bladder, struggling through her carefully prepared one-liners on such subjects as penis envy, explaining that she wished she had a penis because it would ease the problems of pissing at the bus stop on the way home. A man at the back started shouting, "Fuck off, you fat cow" as she ascended the stage, and kept up this war cry until her performance was over. There was no applause.
Her other experiences on the alternative comedy circuit included having a pint of beer thrown at her, having her face slapped, and being pelted with food. But she kept going, and developed that laconic, world-weary style, and material replete with gags at the expense of men, or about urine or worse. In those early days she used the stage name the Sea Monster. She did not want her real name printed in listings magazines in case her work colleagues saw it and turned up at one of her gigs to mock her.
By 1993, she was established enough to merit her own series on Channel 4, Jo Brand through the Cakehole, co-written with comedy writer and partner Jim Miller. More recently she has been a guest on Have I Got News for You and Never Mind the Buzzcocks. She has had several solo television series, and presented shows such as Jo Brand's Commercial Breakdown, and she is the only regular female panellist on QI. In 2003, she was listed in The Observer as one of the 50 funniest acts in British comedy.
Her Doc Marten boots, black T-shirt and leggings, red lipstick and crest of backcombed hair, her refusal to slim, and the jokes she made about sex and obesity led the tabloid press to the inescapable conclusion that she must be a lesbian, in addition to being – in the gallant words of The Sun's Garry Bushell – a "hideous old boiler". She spoilt her reputation somewhat in 1997 with her marriage to Bernie Bourke, and even more so when, at the age of 43, she disappeared from the comedy scene to give up cigarettes, cut the drinking, and have two children in rapid succession. When she returned to the stage, she had a whole new repertoire of jokes about what childbirth and suckling does to a woman's body, how she could light the gas with her nipple and blind a short-legged cat with her bra.
It is said that motherhood has given her humour a softer edge, and has turned her almost into an establishment figure. When David Cameron was elected leader of the Conservative Party, she allowed Labour to use her name for an email campaign pleading for money. She has also been seen on Question Time. Somehow, you feel that a younger Jo Brand would have given Carol Thatcher such a tongue-lashing that the older woman would have been driven out of the room. This week, Jo Brand, 51-year-old mother of two, was not shocking; she was shocked.
A life in brief
Born: Josephine Grace Brand, 3 May 1957, Hastings, East Sussex.
Family: Married Bernie Bourke, a psychiatric nurse, in 1997. They have two daughters and live in south London.
Early life: With an elder and younger brother, she grew up breaking all the rules. A teenage rebel, she left home at 16 after altercations with her parents, lived with a "posh" heroin addict, but eventually made amends and trained as a psychiatric nurse.
Career: Started performing comedy at the age of 29, under the stage name the Sea Monster. Gave up psychiatric nursing to turn professional in 1988 when someone from Friday Night Live saw her act at a comedy club and asked her to audition for the TV show. Her work is renowned for being droll, dark and polemical, applying a razor-sharp wit to feminist issues.
She says: "I tend to think the world is a bit of a miserable place, so anyone who can add to people's optimistic, cheerful side is doing a good job, which is what I hope I'm doing."
They say: "She is one of the loveliest people I've ever known. She's somehow reached the point where no matter how vicious she is in her act she still retains her generosity of spirit." Fellow stand-up Mark Steel
Brand to lead cast of BBC4 drama 15 May 2009
Matthew Hemley
thestage.co.uk
Jo Brand is to star in a BBC4 drama about the lives of three geriatric nurses. Getting On is a three-part series which will also star Joanna Scanlan and Vicki Pepperdine, who, together with Brand, have devised and written the show. It is being directed by Peter Capaldi, who starred in the BBC comedy The Thick of It.
The three-part drama will form part of Grey Expectations, a season of programmes exploring old age, which will be broadcast in July this year. Grey Expectations will also include a documentary about actress Liz Smith, called Liz Smith’s Summer Cruise, in which a camera crew will follow the 87-year-old on holiday.
BBC4 controller Richard Klein said Grey Expectations will offer “rare personal glimpses into experiences of older people”. “It’s also a pleasure to welcome the return of Peter Capaldi’s direction to our screens in the Brand, Scanlan and Pepperdine collaboration Getting On,” he said.
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My dad was a geriatric/psychiatric nurse - he wasn't old though...
BROLLY GOOD SHOW JO The Comedian, Whose Latest Novel is About Mental Illness and Morrissey, Tells Christina Patterson How Her Own Angst Acts As an Inspiration June 01, 2009
By Christina Patterson
belfasttelegraph.co.uk
Jo Brand is talking about her age: "I'm 51 now but I still think there's a big element of me that's quite adolescent. I like to shock people. I quite like to be controversial." Well, Jo, you don't say. You mean that someone who has made their name in comedy with routines in which condoms, tampons, pantyliners, and (in recent years) leaking breasts feature almost more than prepositions didn't just pop that stuff out by accident?
Jo Brand certainly isn't dressed like a shrinking violet. She's wearing a bobbly brown jacket over a navy cotton cardie over a giant black T-shirt that screams that she is 'FREE'. Her red hair is tied up in a pink scarf that's somewhere between Mrs Mop and a small child's bow. From her ears dangle two-beaded Red Indian chiefs.
Jo Brand, fierce, foul-mouthed feminist hated by the tabloids -- and, if you believe them, the entire male species -- is, everyone knows, very, very nice. In spite of all her attempts to portray herself as a man-hating monster, her niceness, her decency, shines out of her in interviews, TV appearances, at charity events and even out of her new novel, The More You Ignore Me. Yes, Jo Brand, juggles more balls than fellow loud-mouth Cherie could even dream of. There's the stand-up, of course. There's the telly. There's the family she shocked the world (who thought she was lesbian) by suddenly rustling up. And there are the novels -- three of them now. The first, Sorting Out Billy, about sex, violence and friendship on a council estate, was hailed by Stephen Fry as "wonderfully funny and inventive". The second, It's Different for Girls, was a lively addition to a now crowded (growing-up-in-the- Seventies-and-discovering-punk) field. And her new novel, The More You Ignore Me, is about mental illness and Morrissey.
It's a sweet, touching, tender novel about the effects of mental illness on those who suffer from it, and on their families. It's also about obsession. When Alice, a teenager with a crush on Morrissey, tries to rehumanise her mad, drugged, moping mother, Gina, by reducing her medication, her mother discovers her Smiths records and falls in love with him, too. It's the start of a journey that takes them all into what a Californian would call "a better place". Otherwise known as a happy ending. Was this Brand wanting to provide a ray of hope in an area -- mental illness -- where rays of hope are pretty rare?
"I did it because I assumed people's expectations would be that I'd give it a kind of dark and unresolved ending," says Brand. "So again the adolescent in me wanted to go against people's expectations." "I also," she adds, perhaps more convincingly, "wanted to show that a woman like Gina who is disturbed and dirty, because she's neglected herself -- that that doesn't mean that there isn't someone that could love her. You don't really see ugly people that are old, or a bit grotty and smelly, in the media. If a Martian came down, they would think we were all tall, thin, attractive and wealthy. Yes I know I'm a lot thinner and prettier than when I'm on telly," Brand says in her show Barely Live, unleashing howls of laughter, and the joke, of course, is that thin doesn't really come into it, that that extra half-stone that telly puts on is but a ripple under the giant T-shirt.
Until she was 16, Jo Brand was both thin and pretty. At 16, she fell in love with a "posh heroin addict" and her parents issued an ultimatum. Shape up or ship out was the gist of it and so she shipped out. She left school, went to live in a bedsit, went on the pill and put on two stone. When she lost the lover (but not the weight) she went back to Hastings High School a day a week to finish her A-levels. She "did really badly", took them again and did "even worse". After working in a garden centre, a wine bar and for the civil service, she asked her mother for advice.
"I kind of knew that I wanted to do comedy," she says, "but I didn't know how to do it, because there wasn't the circuit there is now. I thought the best way was drama school." Her mother, a psychiatric social worker, was less enthusiastic. Her daughter, she said, needed a "back-up" and Brand soon found herself doing a degree in social science and nursing. After failing to get a job as a researcher for a Channel 4 programme about racism, she started work as a psychiatric nurse at the Maudsley hospital in south London, where she'd trained. "Then," she says, "I set about thinking I must be a comedian, but obviously that took years."
She did 10 years of it, absorbing "so much sadness from people's lives" that you can understand the desire to make people laugh. That, however, started earlier --with her two brothers, at home. Her elder bother, Bill, was, she says, funnier, but it was Jo, the sister sandwiched between two boys, and used to fighting them "on every single level", who became determined to succeed in a man's world. "There were hardly any women stand-ups then," she says. "I remember when Victoria Wood started to come through, and I thought she was great, though she and I are very different in our approach. I used to get the 'Oh my God, you're so rude, and you don't have to swear and talk about vaginas to be funny', but I think there was a subconscious attempt on my part to be kind of outrageous. I noticed that women in comedy had to do 10 times more."
It was then, of course, that Jo Brand developed the character 'Jo Brand', the man-hating fat slob who spent much of her stage life in a nether world of the nether regions. It was a character that the tabloids were all too keen to take literally. "Although what I represented was a very crude part of myself," Brand explains, "it was better than doing it another way. I just accepted that I had to take the flak from various arenas because of what I was doing."
But if the tabloids hated her, the public loved her. Even, it seems, the half of it that was male. "I've never, ever had people being aggressive to me in public," she says, "or abusing me, and actually quite a lot of men do say to me 'you're quite good' -- though they can't bear to go 'you're great'."
Anyway, she shocked them all by finding a husband -- also a psychiatric nurse -- and producing two daughters, Maisie and Eliza, in quick succession. Those who branded her a manhater might also be shocked by the new novel. It is, Brand agrees, in many ways about goodness, but it's also a novel about "good blokes". Keith, husband to Gina and father to Alice, is, to use a technical term, a sweetie- pie. "I know that in my act I polarised maleness and femaleness," she says, "and I did that deliberately, but I didn't mean all men were like that, because that would be ridiculous. The men I was talking about were an identifiable group. They objectify women, they intimidate them, and some of them are bullies."
If you want to know about bullies, you could just try going on stage at a comedy club and being very fat. But nobody has to, so why would you? Why would you, in fact, subject yourself to this on a regular basis?
"Well," says Brand, "I think to make a point, but for other women as well. My mum always felt that women deserved as much as men, and should have as much power, so I suppose I opted to go into a very male-dominated arena to try and prove that.
"I knew as soon as I stepped on stage my weight would be the issue, so in a way I had to have some armour to protect me. I think my comedy, the put-downs I do to hecklers, are the accumulated bitterness of years of people feeling it's perfectly acceptable to make a comment on your appearance when they don't know you."
If she still suffers with her size, however, it's clear that pretty much everything else is just fine and dandy. The queen of the laconic put-down is, she confesses, "very happy". "I get offered more work than I can cope with," she says, "so I have the ability to pick and choose things that are interesting to me. That's an amazing position to be in." And then Jo Brand rootles around in her bag, and hands me a box of chocolates. "This is to say sorry for the other day," she says. They're Celebrations. Which sounds about right.
The More You Ignore Me, by Jo Brand, Headline Review, Pounds 12.99
THE MORE YOU IGNORE ME: JO BRAND By Virginia Blackburn
June 12, 2009
COMEDIANS and fiction do not good bedfellows make: after an ill-advised foray into reading Stephen Fry attempting to channel PG Wodehouse, I still wake up in the wee small hours with a fit of the heebie jeebies. But there are two major exceptions to this rule: Ben Elton and, if her latest is anything to go by, Jo Brand.
The subject matter of The More You Ignore Me is challenging as the book is about mental illness as seen through the eyes of a child. The heroine is Alice and we trace her story from the age of five to 20, much of which is spent trying to cope with her mother Gina, a schizophrenic. Gina is obsessed with the local weather forecaster: stark naked, she climbs to the top of the family cottage to proclaim her love before being carted off to a psychiatric ward and spending the next decade and a half on drugs.
Her condition is kept under control but she is able only to lead a half-life. Alice, meanwhile, growing up in Herefordshire with bullies to contend with who make fun of her mother’s befuddled state, seeks solace in the songs of Morrissey (the book is set in the Eighties). But when in her late teens she seeks to have Gina’s medication changed in order to give her some quality of life, Gina in her madness falls for Morrissey too.
It does actually take some talent to distinguish between a teenage crush on a pop star and an obsession borne out of mental illness, but Jo Brand pulls it off. No one is saying that she is up there with Tolstoy but there’s an oddly compulsive element to the prose and you care about what happens to the characters. The author herself is not half as abrasive as her public image suggests, on top of which she was once a nurse in a mental hospital so she knows what she’s writing about.
The book is littered with minor endearing characters: Gina’s weary husband Keith; Marie, the family doctor who is secretly in love with him and Mark, Alice’s only close friend. Their three stories become interlinked with a more than satisfactory conclusion. The last line moved me to tears.
Listen now: Jo Brand live in Ilkley An exclusive interview with comedian Jo Brand and excerpts from her performance at the 2009 Ilkley Literature Festival.
Jo Brand is one of Britain's best-known stand-ups and is also familiar from appearances on TV shows as diverse as Countdown and Have I Got News For you. She has just published the first volume of her autobiography, Look Back In Hunger, in which she recounts her experiences as a psychiatric nurse at the South London Bethlem and Maudsley Hospital, where she worked until the mid-1980s - and about her teenage rebellion.
In this programme she chats with Yorkshire Post Digital Editor David Behrens and then on stage at the King's Hall, Ilkley, with Ruth Pitt.
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